Stan Kesler first joined the Snearly Ranch Boys as a steel
guitarist but the band quickly realised that he could play bass and guitar too and also write songs. He penned several impressive songs at Sun, recorded by Smokey Joe, Warren Smith, Jerry Lee Lewis and others. But one of his first was the best and most lucrative,
''I Forgot To Remember To Forget'', recorded in the summer of 1955 by Elvis Presley. Maybe the clincher for those inclined to give Charlie Feathers the nod is one inescapable fact: it was "I Forgot To Remember
To Forget" (Sun 223), a song Charlie Feathers fashioned with Stan Kesler, which really put Presley on the map when it topped the country chart in September 1955 and stayed in the listing for a phenomenal forty weeks.

Taking the
theme of a clever contradiction as a formula Kesler could use, he also came up with the notion of ''We're Getting Closer To Being Apart''. Perhaps this was also destined to go to Elvis, but first Stan needed a demo of the song. He had a go at singing it himself
but quickly decided that he would have a better tape if he gave part of the song to Charlie Feathers if Charlie would sing it. Charlie's version may be on this session. What we hear here is Stan's original demo.

With just his own rhythm guitar for company he steps hesitantly into his title lyric and proceeds to sing just one verse, twice. There is something
of the Feathers style on lines like ''closer to be-hing apart'' and ''if there's someone else''. Perhaps it was destined for Charlie and not Elvis after all?. Either way, it wasn't released on Sun by anybody.

It
seems as though the Sun vaults never ceased yielding up treasures. This sat for over thirty years on a quarter track tape marked Stan Kesler that featured, among other things, Stan's own attempts at singing. Stan realised that if he was to stand a chance of
selling his material, he needed to have a good demo, so he enlisted the help of Charlie Feathers and gave him 50% of both this song and ''I Forgot To Remember To Forget'' in exchange for singing the demo. Feathers certainly earned his cut on this song. It
is a beautiful hillbilly lament, despite the contrived title, and Feathers handless it to perfection. His phrasing on ''please tell me...'' during the chorus is wonderfully bizarre. The chorus is followed by Stan Kesler's hesitant attempts at playing the fiddle.
Little gems such as this help to compensate to a small degree for the many Feathers cuts that were recorded-over during 1954 and 1955. Interestingly, Feathers remembered the song and recorded it for Vetco twenty years later. As similar as it was to ''I'm Left,
You're Right, She's Gone'' it's entirely possible that this was designed for Elvis Presley's ears.